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Comment Re:The last contractors I hired... (Score 2) 120

Yeah, my experience is that anyone remotely competent is booked forever, while those you can get are all too weighted to the blithering idiot side of the scale. It has inspired me to do my own work, in which I have learned a lot, and realized that I am also somewhat incompetent (but less so than many others, and cheaper, if also much slower).

Comment Re:too bad studies have proven otherwise (Score 1) 262

Under nominal and expected driving conditions...

And that's where everything goes wrong. You know, under "normal and expected conditions" there isn't any dogshit on the sidewalk, but guess what?

I'm aware that not every situation is deal... but a driver who's actually otherwise competent should be able to recognize those situations the instant that they arise..

Unless of course they're busy with whatever else they do under "normal and expected conditions." Switching attention takes time---there's a reason why sprinters are not chatting on the phone right up until they hear the starting gun.

Submission + - USPS discriminates against "Athiest" merchandise (atheistberlin.com) 3

fish waffle writes: Suspecting that their strongly branded "Athiest" products may be treated differently by more religiously-oriented postal regions, Kickstarter success Athiest Shoes conducted an experiment. They sent 178 envelopes to 89 people in different parts of the US, each person receiving one envelope prominently branded as "Athiest" merchandise, and one not. The results: packages with the athiest label were nearly 10 times more likely to never be received, and took on average 3 days longer to show up when they did. Control experiments were also done in Europe and Germany---it's definitely a USPS problem.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 4, Insightful) 1145

There's no doubt the tech-industry could use a lot less pimply-teenage-boy-ism. But in this case, no: firing Richards is about on par. If you TFA you'll find she made jokes herself, on twitter (not even an overheard private conversation), about stuffing socks down pants in TSA pat-downs. That's pretty much exactly in the same stratum as the jokes she was complaining about---both childish and sex-related, neither sexist. If one is worth firing, then so is the other (although both firings are over-reactions, to put it mildly).

Comment Re:Raise the price of books and see a mass exodus (Score 4, Insightful) 155

The publishers need to do a better job of lowering prices as time passes and on older books. But this "digital should be basically free" meme is bullshit.

No, it's not. People accepted physical book prices because they had no way to print them as nicely (yes, that does include the hard/soft-cover, dust-jacket, as well as actual binding, however shitty the glue-binding of current books), and they were willing to attribute some costs to transportation, shelf-stocking/presence, staff in the stores, and so forth. That was made books of value to your average consumer. E-books take that *all* away. The only thing left is a piddly bandwidth cost, and hard to quantify-or-appreciate, mysterious marketing/administration/editing costs. Whether that was actually the bulk of the cost or not doesn't matter---the price of actually printing a book is not the important part here, it's the perception of the price of a printed book. A physical object still seems inherently more valuable than a license to read a book on a device you have to buy separately.

Publishers can whine all they want about how little the physical book costs and how much of the publication cost is really all the other things, but all that does is inform consumers that publishers have been ripping them off for years.

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